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I was a weird XMPP nerd in high school and tried to switch friends from AIM. So here's my experience. * Onboarding was difficult. There was no obvious choice o

by tapoxi 4y ago

I was a weird XMPP nerd in high school and tried to switch friends from AIM. So here's my experience. * Onboarding was difficult. There was no obvious choice of server or client to use. * Adding friends was difficult. You needed to send a subscription request to a contact, and they needed to send one to you. If anything happened during this process, you couldn't chat. * Popular XMPP clients, like Pidgin, also supported the other chat services (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc) so people just continued using those. * Network effect. You need to convince a mass of people its better, otherwise nobody's using it because no-one uses it. * No obvious benefit to the user. It's decentralized sure, but there weren't many improvements over AIM that people actually used. * A lack of good iPhone XMPP clients. In 2005 Google added XMPP support to Google Talk/GMail Chat and they were federated, but nobody federated back and they closed off its successor (Hangouts).

verelo 4y ago
This is a dumb questions, please excuse the ignorance: Why were/are there not (or are there?) adapters so that you can speak whatever protocol you prefer (smtp, xmpp x.400 etc) but it still gets through to the user on the other end?
- zokier 4y ago
  XMPP has explicit support for "transports"/"gateways" for that purpose, so you could plug in AIM/ICQ/whatev support into your XMPP server. See https://spectrum.im/documentation/about.html https://spectrum.im/documentation/about.html for example. IRC has bitlbee (and probably others) to fulfill that role https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html Matrix has "bridges" to interop with other protocols https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bridges/
- metajack 4y ago
  There is a long history of this including multi-protocol clients. You see this now for example as people want a single "chat" for the many places they publish live streams (twitch, youtube, discord, etc). Unfortunately, because you must ultimately support the lowest common denominator you end up with much of the nice features of particular platforms being unavailable or things like the youtube chat filled with comments like `@comment-copy-bot: James (Discord): That was a cool video!` and things like direct messages and emotes don't really work.
- MattJ100 4y ago
  That's exactly what XMPP was originally created for - a single open protocol that would let you interface with all the others. But it's very hard, technically, to maintain interfaces to a changing set of evolving third-party protocols, and provide a good user experience. Especially if those people don't want you bridging to them. Open networks tend to fare better in the long term, but generally the user experience of an app bespoke for the target protocol is nearly always better.
teakettle42 4y ago
> A lack of good iPhone XMPP clients. As someone whose company used XMPP prior to the iPhone, this is what killed it for us, and I suspect it’s a major contributor to federated XMPP losing any public inertia it had. iPhone push notifications could only be sent with a signing key tied to the same developer account as used to publish the client application. That meant it was impossible to send push notifications from your own XMPP server to a generic XMPP client written by someone else.
- lukasb 4y ago
  Fascinating. Is this problem solved for Mastodon?
  - als0 4y ago
    This restriction that push notifications must only come from the developer’s server is a restriction imposed by Apple and their App Store.
    - mjevans 4y ago
      A solution would be E.G. subscribing to a community (an endpoint URL, or what Discord likes to brainwash consumers by calling a 'server') should trigger background actions that allow that community's chosen point of contact to have push notification capabilities, and to maintain that forward until your subscription is expired.
      - throwaway92394 4y ago
        > should trigger background actions Because of the way iOS works nowadays, you cannot reliably do this for notifications because you can't run apps in the background reliably for this purpose. > allow that community's chosen point of contact to have push notification capabilities This is what push notifications are?
        mjevans 4y ago
metajack 4y ago
> In 2005 Google added XMPP support to Google Talk/GMail Chat and they were federated, but nobody federated back and they closed off its successor (Hangouts). I don't think "lack of federation back" was a big driver in this decision. Everyone who used XMPP was able to chat with gchat folks and despite some weird changes Google made to their integration, it worked reasonably well. You didn't need to do anything special to federate with another XMPP server. It just worked like email does. I expect either product complexity (like having to support non-gchat addressing which then requires full JIDs instead of short names) or de-prioritizing features that weren't directly driving their growth thesis were probably more relevant. Ie, why spend two engineers to fix integration concerns and deal with federation everywhere, when you can just retask those headcount onto some new feature that will drive growth.
- tapoxi 4y ago
  I really mean that no other big chat service federated back. The global network of federated XMPP servers was dwarfed by Google's userbase. Maybe if AIM/MSN/Yahoo added an XMPP bridge they would have kept it.
  - als0 4y ago
    Wasn’t Facebook Chat a big one?
    - prash_ant 4y ago
      Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769
      - Macha 4y ago
        Was Facebook messenger ever _federated_ though, like GChat was? You could use an XMPP client with messenger, but you couldn't talk to people on other XMPP servers like you could with Google Talk, from my recollection.
  - yepguy 4y ago
ethn 4y ago
I thought it was pretty easy to use using Pidgin.
- alrlroipsp 4y ago
  Go on...
_abox 4y ago
> A lack of good iPhone XMPP clients And no server based push, though I'm sure someone invented an xmpp extension to fix that eventually :)
wink 4y ago
* A lack of good iPhone XMPP clients. Not only that. I'm putting the downfall of XMPP right about where most people started having a smartphone (2009-12), so it certainly didn't help - also on Android there weren't any great ones, the ones we know today are all younger.

by tapoxi 4y ago

verelo 4y ago

This is a dumb questions, please excuse the ignorance: Why were/are there not (or are there?) adapters so that you can speak whatever protocol you prefer (smtp, xmpp x.400 etc) but it still gets through to the user on the other end?

zokier 4y ago
XMPP has explicit support for "transports"/"gateways" for that purpose, so you could plug in AIM/ICQ/whatev support into your XMPP server. See https://spectrum.im/documentation/about.html https://spectrum.im/documentation/about.html for example. IRC has bitlbee (and probably others) to fulfill that role https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html Matrix has "bridges" to interop with other protocols https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bridges/
metajack 4y ago
There is a long history of this including multi-protocol clients. You see this now for example as people want a single "chat" for the many places they publish live streams (twitch, youtube, discord, etc). Unfortunately, because you must ultimately support the lowest common denominator you end up with much of the nice features of particular platforms being unavailable or things like the youtube chat filled with comments like `@comment-copy-bot: James (Discord): That was a cool video!` and things like direct messages and emotes don't really work.
MattJ100 4y ago
That's exactly what XMPP was originally created for - a single open protocol that would let you interface with all the others. But it's very hard, technically, to maintain interfaces to a changing set of evolving third-party protocols, and provide a good user experience. Especially if those people don't want you bridging to them. Open networks tend to fare better in the long term, but generally the user experience of an app bespoke for the target protocol is nearly always better.

teakettle42 4y ago

> A lack of good iPhone XMPP clients. As someone whose company used XMPP prior to the iPhone, this is what killed it for us, and I suspect it’s a major contributor to federated XMPP losing any public inertia it had. iPhone push notifications could only be sent with a signing key tied to the same developer account as used to publish the client application. That meant it was impossible to send push notifications from your own XMPP server to a generic XMPP client written by someone else.

lukasb 4y ago
Fascinating. Is this problem solved for Mastodon?
- als0 4y ago
  This restriction that push notifications must only come from the developer’s server is a restriction imposed by Apple and their App Store.
  - mjevans 4y ago
    A solution would be E.G. subscribing to a community (an endpoint URL, or what Discord likes to brainwash consumers by calling a 'server') should trigger background actions that allow that community's chosen point of contact to have push notification capabilities, and to maintain that forward until your subscription is expired.
    - throwaway92394 4y ago
      > should trigger background actions Because of the way iOS works nowadays, you cannot reliably do this for notifications because you can't run apps in the background reliably for this purpose. > allow that community's chosen point of contact to have push notification capabilities This is what push notifications are?
      - mjevans 4y ago

metajack 4y ago

> In 2005 Google added XMPP support to Google Talk/GMail Chat and they were federated, but nobody federated back and they closed off its successor (Hangouts). I don't think "lack of federation back" was a big driver in this decision. Everyone who used XMPP was able to chat with gchat folks and despite some weird changes Google made to their integration, it worked reasonably well. You didn't need to do anything special to federate with another XMPP server. It just worked like email does. I expect either product complexity (like having to support non-gchat addressing which then requires full JIDs instead of short names) or de-prioritizing features that weren't directly driving their growth thesis were probably more relevant. Ie, why spend two engineers to fix integration concerns and deal with federation everywhere, when you can just retask those headcount onto some new feature that will drive growth.

tapoxi 4y ago
I really mean that no other big chat service federated back. The global network of federated XMPP servers was dwarfed by Google's userbase. Maybe if AIM/MSN/Yahoo added an XMPP bridge they would have kept it.
- als0 4y ago
  Wasn’t Facebook Chat a big one?
  - prash_ant 4y ago
    Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769
    - Macha 4y ago
      Was Facebook messenger ever _federated_ though, like GChat was? You could use an XMPP client with messenger, but you couldn't talk to people on other XMPP servers like you could with Google Talk, from my recollection.
- yepguy 4y ago

ethn 4y ago

I thought it was pretty easy to use using Pidgin.

alrlroipsp 4y ago
Go on...

_abox 4y ago

> A lack of good iPhone XMPP clients And no server based push, though I'm sure someone invented an xmpp extension to fix that eventually :)

wink 4y ago

* A lack of good iPhone XMPP clients. Not only that. I'm putting the downfall of XMPP right about where most people started having a smartphone (2009-12), so it certainly didn't help - also on Android there weren't any great ones, the ones we know today are all younger.